Introduction - ‘Which Side Are You On'? Towards Meaningful Attention to Class in Museums
Adele Chynoweth
Part I - Shut Out: Access and the Working Class
1. ‘A Permanent Civilising Effect’? The Impact of Reforming Working-Class Museum Visitors in Liverpool during the 19th Century
Alexander Scott
2. How British Museums Have Failed the Working Class
David Fleming
3. Seat of the Muses or the Moolah? New Working-Class Demands on Elitist Archival Practices
Silvio Tamaso D’Onofrio
Part II - Shut Up: the Struggle to End the Silence
4. ‘One and All’? Retrieving South Australia’s Forgotten Labor History
Philip Payton
5. ‘Go and Take a Look at Millie Now’: Murder, Tattooed Remains, and Museum Ethics in Quebec
Jamie Jelinski
6. Museums in Late Populist Democracies: the Photographic Archive and the Working Class
Paolo Magagnoli
7. Women´s Work in Coastal Galicia: Shining a Light on the Unseen at the Marea Museum
José Manuel Vázquez Lijó
Part III - Know Your Place: Site-Specific Narratives
8. Erasure of Working Class Heritage in Conservation Plans: Absent Presence in the Walled City of Lahore
Rabia Nadir
9. Eugene V. Debs' Museum and the Preservation of Radical Working-Class Political Memory
Wesley R. Bishop
10. Keeping Your Head Down at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum
Adele Chynoweth
11. From Factory to Museum: The Obliteration of the History of Resistance
Meral Akbaş and Özge Kelekçi
Part IV- Answering Back: Lessons from the Working and Poverty Classes
12. Looking Backwards, Planning Forward: ‘Museum as Muck’ Advocating for the Working Class in Museums
Michelle McGrath, in conversation with Adele Chynoweth
13. Changing Lives at the Scottish Maritime Museum
Martin Hughes
14. House of Memories: Care and Equality in the UK Museum Sector
Kerry Wilson
15. Ngintaka Songline Tracks in the Museum
Diana James
Biography
Adele Chynoweth has earned her living as a shop assistant, cabaret performer, night club DJ, call centre operator, union organiser, public servant, and teacher in secondary schools and adult vocational education. Adele also studied theatre direction at the Flinders University Drama Centre and completed her PhD with scholarship support. Adele was a Lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University where she received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Policy and Outreach in 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.
“This volume reveals what novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the “danger of a single story.” By omitting the importance of class in the work of the museum, the museum presents its visitors with a one-sided story of society, which, as each chapter demonstrates, is compounded by the museum’s treatment of gender, race, and ability. The international cases presented in the book also demonstrate the power and potential of museums to share a more genuine and accurate story by including the role of class and its intersection with other marginalized positionalities. For museums to answer the call to action to be for everyone, they must tell whole stories.”
Alia Carter, ‘My Reflections on the Power and Potential of Class in the Museum: A Review of Museums and the Working Class’, Fwd: Museums Journal (July 2024)
